Spinsters in Jeopardy

Alleyn said carefully. ‘A lighted window, masked by a spring blind. A woman falling against the blind and releasing it. Beyond the woman, but out of sight to us, there must have been a brilliant lamp and in its light, farther back in the room and on our right, stood a man in a white garment. His face, oddly enough, was in shadow. There was something that looked like a wheel, beyond his right shoulder. His right arm was raised.’

‘And in his hand – ?’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said, ‘that’s the tricky bit, isn’t it?’

‘And then the tunnel. It was like one of those sudden breaks in an old-fashioned film, too abrupt to be really dramatic. It was there and then it didn’t exist. No,’ said Troy, ‘I won’t believe it was true. I won’t believe something is still going on inside that house. And what a house too! It looked like a Gastave Doré, really bad romantic’

Alleyn said: ‘Are you all right to get dressed? I’ll just have a word with the car attendant. He may have seen it, too. After all, we may not be the only people awake and looking out, though I fancy mine was the only compartment with the light on. Yours was in darkness, by the way.’

‘I had the window shutter down, though. I’d been thinking how strange it is to see into other people’s lives through a train window.’

‘I know,’ Alleyn said. ‘There’s a touch of magic in it.’

‘And then – to see that! Not so magical.’

‘Never mind. I’ll talk to the attendant and then I’ll come back and get Ricky up. He’ll be getting train-fever. We should reach Roqueville in about twenty minutes. All right?’

‘Oh, I’m right as a bank,’ said Troy.

‘Nothing like the Golden South for a carefree holiday,’ Alleyn said. He grinned at her, went out into the corridor and opened the door of his own sleeper.

Ricky was still sitting up in his bunk. His hands were clenched and his eyes wide open. ‘You’re being a pretty long time, however,’ he said.

‘Mummy’s coming in a minute. I’m just going to have a word with the chap outside. Stick it out, old boy.’

‘OK,’ said Ricky.

The attendant, a pale man with a dimple in his chin, was dozing on his stool at the forward end of the carriage. Alleyn, who had already discovered that he spoke very little English, addressed him in diplomatic French that had become only slightly hesitant through disuse. Had the attendant, he asked, happened to be awake when the train paused outside a tunnel a few minutes ago? The man seemed to be in some doubt as to whether Alleyn was about to complain because he was asleep or because the train had halted. It took a minute or two to clear up this difficulty and to discover that he had, in point of fact, been asleep for some time.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ Alleyn said, ‘but can you, by any chance tell me the name of the large building near the entrance to the tunnel?’

‘Ah, yes, yes,’ the attendant said. ‘Certainly, monsieur, since I am a native of these parts. It is known to everybody, this house, on account of its great antiquity. It is the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent.’

‘I thought it might be,’ said Alleyn.

II

Alleyn reminded the sleepy attendant that they were leaving the train at Roqueville and tipped him generously. The man thanked him with that peculiarly Gallic effusiveness that is at once too logical and too adroit to be offensive.

‘Do you know,’ Alleyn said, as if on an afterthought, ‘who lives in the Château de la Chèvre d’Argent?’

The attendant believed it was leased to an extremely wealthy gentleman, possibly an American, possibly an Englishman, who entertained very exclusively. He believed the ménage to be an excessively distinguished one.

Alleyn waited for a moment and then said, ‘I think there was a little trouble there tonight. One saw a scene through a lighted window when the train halted.’

The attendant’s shoulders suggested that all things are possible and that speculation is vain. His eyes were as blank as boot buttons in his pallid face. Should he not perhaps fetch the baggage of Monsieur and Madame and the little one in readiness for their descent at Roqueville. He had his hand on the door of Alleyn’s compartment when from somewhere towards the rear of the carriage, a woman screamed twice.

They were short screams, ejaculatory in character, as if they had been wrenched out of her, and very shrill. The attendant wagged his head from side to side in exasperation, begged Alleyn to excuse him, and went off down the corridor to the rearmost compartment. He tapped. Alleyn guessed at an agitated response. The attendant went in and Troy put her head out of her own door.

‘What now, for pity’s sake?’ she asked.

‘Somebody having a nightmare or something. Are you ready?’

‘Yes. But what a rum journey we’re having!’

The attendant came back at a jog-trot. Was Alleyn perhaps a doctor? An English lady had been taken ill. She was in great pain: the abdomen, the attendant elaborated, clutching his own in pantomime. It was evidently a formidable seizure. If Monsieur, by any chance –

Alleyn said he was not a doctor. Troy said, ‘I’ll go and see the poor thing, shall I? Perhaps there’s a doctor somewhere in the train. You get Ricky up, darling.’

She made off down the swaying corridor. The attendant began to tap on doors and to inquire fruitlessly of his passengers if they were doctors. ‘I shall see my comrades of the other voitures,’ he said importantly. ‘Evidently one must organize.’

Alleyn found Ricky sketchily half-dressed and in a child’s panic.

‘Where have you been, however?’ he demanded. ‘Because I didn’t know where everyone was. We’re going to be late for getting out. I can’t find my pants. Where’s Mummy?’

Alleyn calmed him, got him ready and packed their luggage. Ricky, white-faced, sat on the lower bunk with his gaze turned on the door. He liked, when travelling, to have his family under his eye. Alleyn, remembering his own childhood, knew his little son was racked with an illogical and bottomless anxiety, an anxiety that vanished when the door opened and Troy came in.

‘Oh golly, Mum!’ Ricky said and his lip trembled.

‘Hallo, there,’ Troy said in the especially calm voice she kept for Ricky’s panics. She sat down beside him, putting her arm where he could lean back against it and looked at her husband.

‘I think that woman’s very ill,’ she said. ‘She looks frightful. She had what she thought was some kind of food poisoning this morning and dosed herself with castor-oil. And then, just now she had a violent pain, really awful, she says, in the appendix place and now she hasn’t any pain at all and looks ghastly. Wouldn’t that be a perforation, perhaps?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine, my love.’

‘Rory, she’s about fifty and she comes from the Bermudas and has no relations in the world and wears a string bag on her head and she’s never been abroad before and we can’t just let her be whisked on into the Italian Riviera with a perforated appendix if that’s what it is.’

‘Oh, damn!’

‘Well, can we? I said,’ Troy went on, looking sideways at her husband, ‘that you’d come and talk to her.’

‘Darling, what the hell can I do?’

‘You’re calming in a panic, isn’t he, Rick?’

‘Yes,’ said Ricky, again turning white. ‘I don’t suppose you’re both going away, are you, Mummy?’

‘You can come with us. You could look through the corridor window at the sea. It’s shiny with moonlight and Daddy and I will be just on the other side of the poor thing’s door. Her name’s Miss Truebody and she knows Daddy’s a policeman.’

‘Well, I must say …’ Alleyn began indignantly.

‘We’d better hurry, hadn’t we?’ Troy stood up holding Ricky’s hand. He clung to her like a limpet.

At the far end of the corridor their own car attendant stood with two of his colleagues outside Miss Truebody’s door. They made dubious grimaces at one another and spoke in voices that were drowned by the racket of the train. When they saw Troy, they all took off their silver-braided caps and bowed to her. A doctor, they said, had been discovered in the troisième voiture and was now with the unfortunate lady. Perhaps Madame would join him. Their own attendant tapped on the door and with an ineffable smirk at Troy, opened it. ‘Madame!’ he invited.

Troy went in and Ricky feverishly transferred his hold to Alleyn’s hand. Together, they looked out of the corridor window.

The railway, on this part of the coast, followed an embankment a few feet above sea level and as Troy had said, the moon shone on the Mediterranean. A long cape ran out over the glossy water and near its tip a few points of yellow light showed in early-rising households. The stars were beginning to pale.